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If this is the beginning of the end of Linux support for Adobe's other products, such as Flash and Adobe Reader, I say good riddance. We didn't need your 32-bit buggy shit either, Adobe!

Since when are anonymous posters on this forum speaking for the entire community? Flash is one of those essential binary blobs for desktop users - you don't need it? OK But the I write e-mails, documents, watch movies and surf the web crowd, does. And I want it, too.

How did you get to be so dictatorial and vehement to force your believes on all the Linux base? Or are truthful and calm statements like I personally do not need X too humble to be used on a forum?

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The problem is that Adobe can't properly gauge Flash installations on Linux. There are tons of distros that support installing Flash through their own package manager, because they have a license to freely redistribute Flash (or they don't have a license and they don't care).

Adobe will continue to foolishly judge user adoption by who downloads stuff off of their central website, when in fact many downloads happen from other servers on the web (e.g. softpedia) and from package managers.

To be fair, I don't think any package managers (legally) distribute Adobe AIR, but unless Adobe are completely blind, I think the numbers for Flash use on Linux are much much higher -- some 90 - 95% of desktop Linux users probably use Adobe Flash. Even if that entire market segment is conservatively marked up as 1%, that's still 1 in every 100 users suddenly hating the guts of your company -- hopefully Adobe is wise enough to avoid that situation.

Yeah. I work on an indie game that only runs on Windows (we inherited a huge codebase from another developer and it uses DirectDraw, and we only have 2 developers, so give us a break), and even within our tiny community of about 100 people, 5 of them are itching to get us to make a Linux client and/or improve the game's functionality under wine.

it's too bad we can't track Adobe downloads from package managers , etc. It would be nice to shove that down their throats. I bet the numbers are much higher than they think.

5 out of 100 people (5%) - is on the money, according to W3schools statistics.

cheerz

PS: what is the game? (a link??) I'd be interested in having a look., I'm not much of a gamer, but am still interested nonetheless, being as we're having this conversation... (nor, would i hold it against you, being as you inherited MS only Software!)

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Since when are anonymous posters on this forum speaking for the entire community? Flash is one of those essential binary blobs for desktop users - you don't need it? OK But the I write e-mails, documents, watch movies and surf the web crowd, does. And I want it, too.

How did you get to be so dictatorial and vehement to force your believes on all the Linux base? Or are truthful and calm statements like I personally do not need X too humble to be used on a forum?

A few things:

It doesn't really matter what you want; Adobe only cares if you and at least a few hundred million other people running the same platform want the same thing.

Adobe doesn't read Phoronix forums.

Even if they did, they wouldn't take our comments as representative of all Linux users; even they aren't that naive.

Yes, humble comments are not normally used on a forum. Welcome to the Internet. I'm completely unapologetic for speaking on behalf of an unqualified "we". For all you know, I could be referring to myself and my immediate family, who could very well agree with me. You made the assumption that the "we" I referred to was the entire Linux community, which isn't necessarily the case. And even if it were, so what? It's not like Adobe does what I say, anyway. I was just letting off steam.

For companies that actually browse our forums (hello AMD, PathScale, Frozenbyte, Unigine, Red Hat), sharing our opinions here on Phoronix really counts. And in those cases, trying to misrepresent one's own opinion as representing the entire community is, at least, misleading to the company folks (though I suspect even employees of these companies are smart enough not to take one person's reply as representative of the whole). But when the company folks aren't even a part of our community, who cares? All messages in this thread are going to /dev/null anyway -- or at least, they're certainly not going to Adobe.

I'm a bit more careful in my wording when I am writing a post that I suspect a company rep might read, but Adobe is a company that every Linux user should enjoy bashing once in a while. It's not like they'll hear you complaining, so it's just harmless fun. :P

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It doesn't really matter what you want; Adobe only cares if you and at least a few hundred million other people running the same platform want the same thing.

Adobe doesn't read Phoronix forums.

Even if they did, they wouldn't take our comments as representative of all Linux users; even they aren't that naive.

Yes, humble comments are not normally used on a forum. Welcome to the Internet. I'm completely unapologetic for speaking on behalf of an unqualified "we". For all you know, I could be referring to myself and my immediate family, who could very well agree with me. You made the assumption that the "we" I referred to was the entire Linux community, which isn't necessarily the case. And even if it were, so what? It's not like Adobe does what I say, anyway. I was just letting off steam.

That's all fine, but it excludes a lucid dialogue. And that's what a forum is suppose to be.

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it's too bad we can't track Adobe downloads from package managers , etc. It would be nice to shove that down their throats. I bet the numbers are much higher than they think.

The closest we have is Ubuntu's popcon statistics on flash, but since popcon is only enabled voluntarily by people who either (a) know about popcon specifically or (b) click on the very last tab of the Software Sources application, it's a very small, non-representative sample set. But, considering that in 11.04 you can install Flash with a single mouse click during the installation process, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the statistic is something like 90% of Ubuntu Desktop installations (and less than 5% of Ubuntu Server).

Still, getting hard statistics in a decentralized, opt-in scenario like this is nigh impossible.

I wish they would enable popcon by default, with a checkbox in the installer to opt-out of the popcon. That'd give us a lot more data to work with. Especially if the other Flash-shipping distros (Arch? Gentoo?) would do the same with a popcon-equivalent for their package manager.

PS: what is the game? (a link??) I'd be interested in having a look., I'm not much of a gamer, but am still interested nonetheless, being as we're having this conversation... (nor, would i hold it against you, being as you inherited MS only Software!)

I'll PM it to you, since a Windows game is completely off-topic for Phoronix (even if it does run fairly well in Wine after my recent code changes...).

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So if that 0.5% of their downloads is a tiny fraction of the supposed 1% Linux desktop market, then they're not seeing many people download it for other operating systems either.

Their numbers simply make no sense to me.

Could be that the 0.5% is talking about the Linux share - that is, just one in every two hundred Linux desktop users bothers to install AIR. That at least sounds plausible, if still higher than I'd have guessed - this article was the first I knew that a Linux AIR client existed (not that I'd ever felt the absence).

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The closest we have is Ubuntu's popcon statistics on flash, but since popcon is only enabled voluntarily by people who either (a) know about popcon specifically or (b) click on the very last tab of the Software Sources application, it's a very small, non-representative sample set. But, considering that in 11.04 you can install Flash with a single mouse click during the installation process, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the statistic is something like 90% of Ubuntu Desktop installations (and less than 5% of Ubuntu Server).

Still, getting hard statistics in a decentralized, opt-in scenario like this is nigh impossible.

I wish they would enable popcon by default, with a checkbox in the installer to opt-out of the popcon. That'd give us a lot more data to work with. Especially if the other Flash-shipping distros (Arch? Gentoo?) would do the same with a popcon-equivalent for their package manager.

I'll PM it to you, since a Windows game is completely off-topic for Phoronix (even if it does run fairly well in Wine after my recent code changes...).

cool. (about the game)

About popcorn - i wasn't aware of this technology. thanks for the info!

My feeling is that not only should it be a default/turned on... but i think every distribution should track propreitary software downloads - and provide the data to the various companies being tracked.... my logic here is that it would better allow companies to see their true user-base, instead of using potentially flawed statistics. (im sure this was Canonical's idea to - it's just to bad they decided to turn it off by default, making popcorn absolutely pointless...lol)

People whine and bitch about companies like adobe not being willing to port software over, or discontinuing support, but what do we expect them to do, if from their own perspective (and data they have access to), they see no point...?

I really think there needs to be some work done in the various open-source / distribution communities to make something like popcorn a standard / and a reality. It would benefit everyone, in a big way....